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Comment by beforeolives | Hacker News Reader

Who is doing dependencies right in your opinion? Because it feels like it's a complaint I hear about every language.

Might be biased/stereotypical, but Rust's cargo does dependencies really well. It's as easy as npm to add new dependencies, but there aren't thousands needed to do anything, and if you take a look at your Cargo.lock/`cargo tree` you can really get to know each of them and what they do or why they're pulled in. I'm still bloat-wary, maybe as a leftover from doing webdev, but with less transitive dependencies in the first place you can actually go through and prune things that aren't needed, or open PRs to transitive deps to prune from their trees or update deps to the latest version to deduplicate your tree. (If there are multiple semver-incompatible versions in a dep tree, they just both get compiled in - for most apps though, you should be able to get the number of duplicates to 0 or almost that.)

I wonder how Cargo will be regarded as in 2-5 years if it gets anywhere near the number of projects/libraries that say Python or Javascript has.

You can either go to lunch or buy a Threadripper server to be able to compile a full project from scratch, everytime you want to check something.

Unless by then cargo has already learned how to deal with binary crates.

If compile time is the problem, Rust is not (yet?) the solution.

I agree that Cargo is much better than the Go build system, though.

coolreader18's points are mostly about the culture of JavaScript vs. Rust (where Go also hews much closer to the Rust side). Setting aside lockfiles vs. MVS (which won't get "solved" in an HN debate), why do you prefer Cargo to go mod?

For me, it only gets the "really well" when it also does binary dependencies vcpkg/conan style.

Having tried both, focusing on source dependencies is the only way to make sure that dependency sources are universally available and buildable, which makes a huge difference in the long run. Just look at NuGet's issues getting SourceLink adopted.

Binary caching á la Nix can work, but I can't really see that working out without Nix's commitment to environment purity.

When one is lucky to use server hardware as workstation, and works in domains that don't depend on selling binary libraries for their business.

> When one is lucky to use server hardware as workstation

Sounds like something is pretty screwed up if you're running cargo clean as part of your regular workflow.

> works in domains that don't depend on selling binary libraries for their business

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes? Meh.

IMO, Ruby Bundler was the first language / ecosystem to really get dependencies right. AFAIK, they were the first to have a lockfile locking the version of each dependency and a Gemfile with flexible version specification for dependencies, and a tool to handle installing the right version of everything and making sure you run in the context of your specified gems every time, no matter what else is installed on the machine.

Rust Cargo does about as well, probably the best for a compiled language. NPM could be about as good too - it almost feels like they deserve a point off for the ridiculously huge number of tiny packages required to do anything, though that isn't really the dependency manager's fault.

CPAN and Maven did it first.

Maven doesn't have a lockfile, from just reading the files it's difficult to find the version of a dependency you'll actually get.

It doesn't need one, when version is already part of dependency definition.

If you want to be sure of what version you get, use it.

Transitive dependencies are not going to be in your POM file normally, and Maven has a confusing algorithm for resolving them (essentially, first found in a BFS over the dependency tree). And if you do include them, that will silently override transitive dependencies on more recent versions, which is rarely what is wanted.

Yes, you can ask the tool to print them. This is way worse than any of the other systems being discussed, where you can read a file in the repo.

It is so hard to redirect the tool output to my-favourite-filename.lock, beyond the skills of the average developer.

One may like it or not, but defaults matter.

Defaults don't change history.

Naming the file .lock does not make it a lockfile. (I can't believe I have to write that sentence. I don't think you're discussing technical details in good faith.)

Of course not, it fixes "... where you can read a file in the repo", because Maven already does everything else anyway.

> Ruby Bundler was the first language / ecosystem to really get dependencies right. AFAIK, they were the first to have a lockfile locking the version of each dependency and a Gemfile with flexible version specification for dependencies,

So other than having a lockfile and having a flexible version specification (and a sensible way to resolve multiple version requests), Maven did "it" first!

... what was "it" again?

Everything.

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